Let’s begin sharing photos, recipes, and food experiences via Flickr or blogs. Just use the unique tag “globalcookbook” to share with other educators and students around the globe! Participate on your own or with students — food is a great way to make connections. See my previous post for all the details!

If you’re interested in the dish pictured on the right, just click on it to go to my Flickr photostream. Once there you’ll be able to find out why this meal was so memorable for me!

For the Blogging4Educators EVO session, Week Four will be devoted to making your blog unique. BlogEd08 has just sent a Tweet asking for people to respond with their favorite blog tools or widgets. Please help us out by responding to @BlogEd08 on Twitter, and by spreading the request to your network if possible. We will compile the responses and include them in an upcoming post for Blogging4Educators. In this way, we hope to introduce participants to many tools and widgets to make their blogs unique and also to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter. Thanks for your help!

Update on February 10, 2008: I have finished gathering responses for the Twitter poll, and have written a blog post summarizing the results. (This was really challenging for me since I’m not so familiar with working with images this much!) Find the post on the Blogging4Educators session blog Tools we Love!

In response to my last post, Connecting and Reflecting, Patricia asked, “I was wondering if you could somehow describe the process of starting and leading this [Film Festival] project (benefits, challenges, etc) for the other participants [of SMiELT]. ” She also said, “It would be great if you could share this project with us as I feel that often our discussion of the social media revolve around discussing them in theory; we would like to see practical applications of what teachers do.” Although I did not generate the idea for or lead the Film Festival Project, I would like to share my reflections on the process of participating in it.

Sometimes it can be a challenge to find classes to collaborate with because two classes usually need to be studying the same thing at the same time and the learners should have similar levels of English proficiency. In the case of the cartoon festival, it was ongoing for the year 2007, and the theme was broad enough so it could fit with a variety of curricula, so it was fairly easy to participate. I contacted Carla R about joining the project, and she guided me to the Cartoon Festival wiki where you will see the specific organization of the project.

My class had a scheduled period in the computer lab every other week. I had introduced students to the project and the theme; then, when we were in the lab, students worked on creating their films using dVolver. Although I provided the students with instructions how to create their films, they did encounter a few difficulties. For example, the length of each character’s utterance is limited to a certain number of characters; also, some students had difficulty e-mailing me their finished products. In the end, I received all of their films via e-mail.

Next, I asked students to write short “directors’ statements” to help them put their movies in context. After all, since the movies would be viewed by students and teachers who may be unfamiliar with Japanese culture, the movies needed to have some background information. I then posted the links to the movies along with the directors’ statements to our class blog, Get Hip to Learning English. Although you can generate HTML code to insert the movies directly to a blog or web site, I decided just to link to the students’ movies directly. The next time we were in the lab, students viewed each other’s films, and left comments for each other via the comment box below the movie. Finally, students voted on the one that they liked the most. A popular movie in our class was “No Eyebrow

In my opinion, the benefit of this project was having the opportunity to use English creatively and to communicate a message for an international audience. In doing so, students not only had the opportunity to connect with others, but also to watch and learn from movies about young people’s lives in other countries.

The first blog I opened is on Blogger and it is called One Teacher’s Journey. Now, here I am opening a new blog, using a new blog host, and taking part in another journey. This time I thought it would be more appropriate to name my new blog One Learner’s Journey, for I am always learning, and this blog begins with the hope that I will chronicle my learning journey during the SMiELT EVO session. SMiELT stands for Social Media in ELT, although every time I see the abbreviation I read it as SMILE. Because when I am in the company of friends and learning new things with them, I am always smiling; after all, SMILE could stand for Social Media in Language Education. Another journey begins!